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4. Living in America
- Temple University Press
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FOUR Living in America Housing We were in a heated debate over the rights of Blacks in American society. Momma came into the room and said: "Stop your arguing. We're all Americans. It's Thanksgiving. Eat your spaghetti." -Gena C. Baroni In the 1870S the Italian community in lower Manhattan began to spread beyond lower Mulberry Street. The Italians took over Hester and Mott Streets from the Irish, gradually replaced them on Baxter Street, and spilled over into upper Mulberry. By 1880 there were 20,000 Italians living in the Mulberry Street area, on Eleventh Street, uptown in Yorkville, and across the Hudson River in Hoboken. They occupied some of the poorest housing in the city. The notorious Five Points section of lower Manhattan was referred to jokingly as the "Boulevard des Italians," thus discrediting the Italians by associating them in the public's mind with the creation of the worst slum in New York. The thousands of Italians who moved into Five Points, crowding others who had been there for decades, lived in filth and squalor, working as shoeshine boys, organ grinders, garbagemen, and rag collectors . These people had known the chronic poverty of the Italian countryside , but even the stark misery of the most desolate mountain village of Basilicata could barely compete with what awaited them in New York. In 1879, Adolfo Rossi wandered through these streets several times, marveling at the tenacity of the inhabitants and their ability to survive in an environment poorer than most barnyard animals en- 118 LIVING IN AMERICA joyed. A sense of total alienation and hopelessness so gripped the population that, whenever possible, men and women would descend to one of the many subterranean bars to drink themselves into a stupor on overpriced rotgut. I Angelo Mosso, in 1905, was appalled by what his countrymen had to endure as immigrants. "It is a sad spectacle seeing tens of thousands of famished people as collectors of animal and human refuse. The ugly, overcrowded tenements in which they reside must harbor every conceivable infection." 2 Marginati was shocked by the filth and misery of Mott and Mulberry Streets. The entire Italian colony, he said, was not worth "the price of the small amount of dynamite needed to blow it up." 3 Franco Ciarlantini on the other hand was entranced by the pace and style of life among the New York Italians. He found a certain exotic charm in the slum existence, describing the Italian colony as emitting" a babble of sounds, a variety of odors. The tone is set most of all by the children, who are everywhere . They dominate the streets, the squares, the parks, incontestably . The streets are full of color, of contrasts, of festivity." Immigrant housing in other major cities was also rude and primitive . Gaetano Conte was struck most by the density of Boston's North End tenement population, where 85 percent of the Italians lived in the 1890s. Ciarlantini's "variety of odors" was for Conte an "unsupportable stench," particularly noticeable on a sweltering summer day. The smells were nauseating, the vermin omnipresent, and the cleaning facilities scanty. There was no escape from the rot and decay of the housing and the suffocating pressure of people. The poorest Italians lived huddled together in miserable apartments, covered with filth and dressed in rags. Their diet consisted largely of stale bread, stale fruit, and stale beer. The rents far exceeded the quality of the apartments . Back rooms with little or no natural light, renting for $1.75 to $2.50 a month, were occupied by whole families or by a number of male lodgers. Three or four slept to a bed.- To the outsider, the North End was a dusty, dirty, and mysterious place, considered dangerous after dark. The housing available to immigrants in the United States was not always an improvement for them; even those who had lived modestly in Italy were shocked by what was considered habitable housing in urban America. Alessandro De Luca's expectations of America the Beautiful were shattered when his family moved into an apartment on Mulberry Street. "The city look to me very ugly. I never see good sky. [54.144.95.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:18 GMT) LIVING IN AMERICA 119 It is difficult for me to explain my disgust. The next day I feel to come back to Italy." 5 He had enjoyed the comforts of a large house in his homeland; now the family was squeezed into...